


The Reward of a Thing Well Done

by thedevilchicken



Category: Murder She Wrote
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 05:30:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7347040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jessica saves the day, sometimes people are grateful. Sometimes there are rewards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Reward of a Thing Well Done

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Missy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/gifts).



When Jessica MacGill was seven years old and sitting attentively in English class, her classmate's favorite teddybear upped and disappeared as if into the ether. There were floods of tears but by the end of the day, it was sitting right back there on her desk again; it was Jessica who found it. She had a big gold star on her work that day.

When Jessica was fourteen and on her way to the library one summer morning, she heard her next door neighbor's bicycle had gone astray. He was their mailman and his round took hours by foot but two days later, it was back there in his garden like it had never been gone at all; it was Jessica who returned it. He brought her a jar of his sister's homemade raspberry preserve to say thank you.

When Jessica was twenty-one and in her junior year at Harrison College, her English professor's teenage daughter vanished suddenly. Three long days of anxiety later - not to mention a hurried essay on madness in Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ \- the family was reunited there on campus; it was Jessica who brought the girl back safe. She doesn't think the A on her assignment was entirely related, but perhaps it didn't hurt. 

When she was twenty-eight and happily married, called Fletcher then instead of MacGill, her husband's brother's wife's aunt's lover died in the night quite close to Thanksgiving. Jessica's husband's brother's wife's aunt was accused of his murder, but in the end it came to nothing; it was Jessica that got her off the hook. Nobody would let her lift a finger at Thanksgiving dinner. It was all quite overwhelming.

When she was thirty-five, there was another murder. When she was forty-two, there was another one. There were several in between, she has to admit. There have been many more since.

"How many murders have you actually solved, Aunt Jess?" her nephew Grady asked her in the kitchen over dinner, when she was forty-nine. 

Frank laughed. "Likely one for every year she's been alive," he said. Jessica found she honestly didn't know.

That night, she sat down at the kitchen table to work it out and count them all; it took more than the fingers of both her hands twice over, since half of the names in her address book turned out to be grateful suspects whose names she'd cleared. She's never told Grady what the actual figure is, but after that night she began to keep a tally. Frank was very nearly right.

Of course, that was when she still taught high school English, back when Frank was still alive and well. Since she retired, the number's grown and keeps on growing. Her address book keeps on filling up. 

It was the following morning when she started her first book, on the old Royal typewriter she kept in the house to do paperwork. She typed out the first three pages without even thinking much about it, then she smiled and shook her head and put the pages in a folder in a drawer. When she was fifty-six and Frank - God rest his soul - was dead and gone, she took those pages out again. She wrote the book to keep herself busy; since Grady 'helped' to have it published, she's never had to work to fill another moment. She has her books. She has her mysteries. She has her family and her friends and all the grateful people that she's helped along the way.

She retired her typewriter years ago; when she was sixty-three, she finally bought herself a shiny new computer. She thinks sometimes technologies have come and gone almost as frequently as the murders that she's written, or maybe just the ones she's solved, and she's kept up so that she can write the world around her in her books convincingly. And it will never replace a good library, of course, but Google does help her with research.

Now her nieces and her nephews and their children all use Skype and they wave and smile instead of calling on the telephone, and her newest laptop computer is ten times lighter than the lightest typewriter she ever owned. She takes it with her on her trips and there's an airplane ticket sitting on the kitchen counter ready for the morning - she's never short on family or friends to visit all around the world because her address book is full to overflowing and the Fletcher clan just keeps on growing. She likes to think that Frank would be be proud that Grady's son's named after him. She likes to think that Frank would be proud of everything that she's done, too. He always said he was.

The telephone rings, the smartphone she likes even though she has to put on her glasses to type on it and autocorrect is the bane of her life. Sometimes, over lunch in her kitchen, Seth looks at her as if the apocalypse is nigh because she's texting like Cabot Cove's delinquent youth. Of course, in Cabot Cove, _delinquent_ only means they forget to hold the grocery store door for you when you've gone out to buy a bottle of milk, not that they're stealing cars and joyriding the night away. She's helped some of them, too. They usually hold the door.

"So, how's the new book coming along, Aunt Jess?" Grady asks when she answers, though they both know she's never missed a deadline in her life. Her publishers are almost as grateful for that as the people she helps.

"I'll be done in time for your birthday, Grady," she replies, and they both know he'll be the first to read it when she's finished, and then his son Frankie will soon after. She'll finish this book and then she'll start another. They're all still bestsellers, after all this time. People still queue to have her sign a copy in bookstores all around the country, though these days most of her sales are online.

She has a lot of stories left to tell, she thinks, and she's come a long way since _The Corpse Danced at Midnight_. She still has a lot of mysteries to solve, she thinks, and she's come a long way since a schoolgirl's missing teddybear. And the people she helps are grateful, she thinks, but she's never done it for rewards they sometimes give her. It's never even for the thanks she gets, at least no more than she writes her books for the plaudits. Accolades have never been important.

"Say, Aunt Jess," Grady says on the telephone, and she can quite clearly picture the expression on his face. "Donna has a friend whose son's just been arrested. They think he killed his boss! But, I mean, that doesn't make any sense." He pauses; she waits. "Would you mind... I wouldn't ask, but... Donna says..." He trails off, and she understands.

"Oh, Grady," she says fondly, and her gaze settles on the tickets sitting on the counter. She's due to fly out to visit with Claire and the sisters at their Louisiana convent, though it's been a long time now since their mischievous sorority days. But Claire will understand if she changes her plans and arrives there just a few days late. "I'll be there in the morning."

Jessica knows that family and friends come first, but since that very first missing teddybear she's known that puzzles come in very close behind. She just can't resist them. She thanks her lucky stars that her mind's still just as sharp as it always was, because she doesn't know what she'd do without.

Jessica smiles as she hangs up the phone. She's eighty-four years old, and she has another mystery to solve; the solution is its own reward.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The reward of a thing well done is having done it".


End file.
